Waitress!

My review was written in September 1982 after a Times Square screening.

"Waitress" is a low-budget comedy picture from the team responsible for the successful "Squeeze Play". Only intermittently funny, the new film is serviceable in general situations.

Episodic in the extreme, pic limns the comic experiences of three waitresses at a New York City restaurant. Andrea (Carol Drake) is a feisty would-be Broadway actress working the restaurant gig until her big break. Jennifer (Carol Bevar) is a beautiful blonde fronting as a server while working on "how to meet men" article for a teen magazine, and Lindsey (Renata Majer) is a young girl who was kicked out of Troma Prep School and forced by her dad to work in his restaurant.

Getting off to a hectic start, "Waitress" becomes wearisome with its reliance on food gags, pratfalls , old puns and vulgar schtick. Pic bogs down in the middle for plot material and a romantic interlude involving cafe manager Jerry (Jim Harris), who is opposed to Andrea's acting career obsession, but reverts to sheer anarchy when Lindsey is put in charge of the eatery and succeeds in wrecking it. A very old-fashioned ending has all the leads' dreams come true.

Within a format which is closer to the sketch humor of drive-in films of yore, such as "If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind" than sustained "Porky's" comedy, "Waitress" suffers from non-stop overacting. Although the leads are personable and in some cases attractive this is probably one credit they would like to forget. With more than 200 actors credited in the cast, most in bits, best performance is by Anthony Sarrero, genuinely amusing in a pleasantly overdone attempted cowboy style seduction of Jennifer.

Other actors simply try too hard here, with use of Three Stooges-style sound effects tending to overshadow any shadings. Tech credits are variable but adequate.

"Waitress!" is about as bad as a comedy can get. It can barely be called a movie; it's more like a collage of randomly connected images and scenes that don't build from each other or move any sort of plot forward. And the editing is so rapid it may give you a headache. I'd give this dreadful film 0.5 out of 4 stars.

"Waitress" is a bad movie when judged by the Hollywood standard. The technical aspects fall short of generally accepted norms, the editing sometimes makes you wonder if they resorted to using what they had instead of the best takes, the acting wavers between inspired and insipid, and the writing cannot stay on track long enough to get any single aspect of the story to the front, to allow a single thread to connect the feature.

All of the above combine to make a lurching, bumbling, lost in the dark movie that just also happens to be fun to watch. It could have been better-- but a better film would not have been as good.

Waitress is fun. Not "PC" in any form, not a glossy product, just fun in the context of the time it was made. A bad movie that is fun to watch-- another example of the contradiction of the American Dream.

Billed as some sort of comedy, it completely misses on all levels. It's a confusing mess that never plants its feet and for that matter, ever figures out where/why they should be planted. The acting is horrible, the gags look like they were all rejects from the worst vaudeville shows. It mainly revolves around a NYC restaurant that has an overflowing amount of patrons, while being served food that is too gross to look at , yet alone eat. I don't recognize any "actors" in this film but they constantly offer childish/pun-like food-jokes even Benny Hill would not touch with a 10-foot fish-stick. The restaurant has a maniacal/drunk Russian chef and a wait-staff of about 20-women, but apparently there was no budget for the wardrobe department to provide them bras. If braless pokies are for you, at the cost of being totally annoyed and grossed-out, then this is the film for you.

This movie qualifies as a "guilty" pleasure...a loopy plot surrounding an aspiring actress and her restauranteur-wannabe boyfriend (and actually featuring some quality 'soft-core' sex scenes that actually enhance the plot/humor), intercut with some of the best/worst sight gags and one-liners ever filmed. You actually wait for the the next joke, to see if it will fall into one or the other categories!

A major complain is that the movie never really decides WHAT to be--soft-core porn, slapstick comedy or gag-fest. That indecisiveness really throws off the movie's plot, wherever it is.

You will never, ever order wine the same after seeing this movie.